The story
Zleague, I mean reddit
As someone who writes about video games for a living, I am deeply annoyed/terrified about the prospect of AI-run websites not necessarily replacing me, but doing things like at the very least, crowding me out of Google, given that Google does not seem to care whatsoever whether content is AI-generated or not.
That’s why it’s refreshing to see a little bit of justice dished out in a very funny way from a gaming community. The World of Warcraft subreddit recently realized that a website, zleague.gg (I am not linking to it), which runs a blog attached to some of sort of gaming app which is its main business, has been scraping reddit threads, feeding them through an AI and summarizing them with “key takeaways” and regurgitated paragraphs that all follow the same format. It’s gross, and yet it generates an article long enough with enough keywords to show up on Google.
Well, the redditors got annoyed and decided to mess with the bots. On r/WoW, they made a lengthy thread discussing the arrival of Glorbo in the game, a new feature that, as you may be able to guess from the name, is not real.
“I have to say, since they started hinting at it in Hearthstone in 1994, it was obvious that they would introduce Glorbo to World of Warcraft sooner or later. I feel like Dragonflight has been win after win so far, like when they brought back Chen Stormstout as the end boss of the new Karazhan? Absolutely amazing!”
And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled “World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction. Here’s are the “key takeaways”:
- “Players express excitement for Glorbo’s arrival and its potential impact on the game.”
- “Some players have reservations about the mandatory item Klikclac and its effect on casual players.”
- “Rumors of Stormsong Valley becoming the new location for the Halfhill Market and farming sim mini-game generate enthusiasm.”
- “Appreciation for previous game changes, such as the inclusion of Klaxxi as a playable race.”
That is… all essentially nonsense. The article was left online for a while but has finally been taken down (here’s a mirror, it’s hilarious). All the authors listed as having bylines on the site are fake. It appears this entire thing is run with close to zero oversight.
It’s a weird situation because the site is not “stealing” in the traditional sense, directly plagiarizing without credit. It is citing reddit threads and their authors and even embedding the reddit post a lot of the time. But while getting story ideas from reddit and expanding on them is one thing, given that these are often the biggest communities for individual games on the internet, it’s a different matter to simply auto-feed reddit threads into an AI and have them spit this out. But again, there’s nothing to stop this. These subreddits can’t only fill themselves with joke articles to screw up a site like this, even if this one specific example is good for a laugh.
The only way this will ever be stopped is if Google steps in and dramatically deranks or bans AI-based sites like this, as begging for Google traffic crumbs is the only reason these sites exist in the first place. But since Google has its own very obvious vested interest in AI, I am not holding my breath.
Anyway, get hyped for Glorbo, I hear it’s the best change since the quest to depose Quackion, the Aspect of Ducks.
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